474 Darwinism and Sociology 



that the types which are fittest to surmount great obstacles are not 

 so much those who engage in the fiercest competitive struggle for 

 existence, as those who contrive to temper it. From all these observa- 

 tions there resulted, along with a limitation of Darwinian pessimism, 

 some encouragement for the aspirations of the collectivists. 



And Darwin himself would, doubtless, have subscribed to these 

 rectifications. He never insisted, like his rival, Wallace, upon the 

 necessity of the solitary struggle of creatures in a state of nature, 

 each for himself and against all. On the contrary, in The Descent of 

 Man, he pointed out the serviceableness of the social instincts, and 

 corroborated Bagehot's statements when the latter, applying laws of 

 physics to politics, showed the great advantage societies derived from 

 intercourse and communion. Again, the theory of sexual evolution 

 which makes the evolution of types depend increasingly upon prefer- 

 ences, judgments, mental factors, surely offers something to qualify 

 what seems hard and brutal in the theory of natural selection. 



But, as often happens with disciples, the Darwinians had out- 

 Darwined Darwin. The extravagancies of social Darwinism provoked 

 a useful reaction ; and thus people were led to seek, even in the 

 animal kingdom, for facts of solidarity which would serve to justify 

 humane effort. 



On quite another line, however, an attempt has been made to 

 connect socialist tendencies with Darwinian principles. Marx and 

 Darwin have been confronted ; and writers have undertaken to show 

 that the work of the German philosopher fell readily into line with 

 that of the English naturalist and was a development of it. Such has 

 been the endeavour of Ferri in Italy and of Woltmann in Germany, 

 not to mention others. The founders of " scientific socialism " had, 

 moreover, themselves thought of this reconciliation. They make more 

 than one allusion to Darwin in works which appeared after 1859. 

 And sometimes they use his theory to define by contrast their own 

 ideal. They remark that the capitalist system, by giving free course 

 to individual competition, ends indeed in a helium omnium contra 

 omnes ; and they make it clear that Darwinism, thus understood, is 

 as repugnant to them as to Duhring. 



But it is at the scientific and not at the moral point of view that 

 they place themselves when they connect their economic history with 

 Darwin's work. Thanks to this unifying hypothesis, they claim to 

 have constructed — as Marx does in his preface to Das Kapital — a 

 veritable natural history of social evolution. Engels speaks in 

 praise of his friend Marx as having discovered the true mainspring 

 of history hidden under the veil of idealism and sentimentalism, and 

 as having proclaimed in the primum vivere the inevitableness of 





